


both my broken hands are true

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode 9 spoilers, Gen, Ghosts, but it diverts after episode 9, primsy's got a lot more going on than we give her credit for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24677188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: In which Jet is a ghost, Annabelle Cheddar learns that even death can’t make Candia considerate, and Primsy Coldbottle comes into her own.
Relationships: Primsy Coldbottle & Annabelle Cheddar, Primsy Coldbottle & Jet Rocks, jetprimsy if you squint
Comments: 5
Kudos: 61





	both my broken hands are true

Three days after reaffirming their alliance with House Rocks and leaving the shores of Candia, a storm swirls up around their new ship and with it comes a crew of pirates. In an unlucky twist of fate, Primsy finds herself in the crow’s nest  _ again  _ as the world goes to hell around her.

Annabelle is shouting somewhere below, obscured by the low clouds and downpour. Her cousin is likely at the helm trying to guide them through the storm. The rest of the sailors, what few of them there are, clash blades and trade blows with their boarders. Primsy, with three weeks of weapons training and a single sharp dagger, is breathing quickly as a pirate clambers up the rigging and sneers at her. 

If this is the end of things, for Primsy, it doesn’t feel very dignified.. The yogurt rain makes the platform slippery beneath her and she is quickly disarmed. Her still-healing stomach twinges at the exact wrong time and she winces, doubling over as her foe raises his sword.

Jet Rocks’ hand clamps down on the pirate’s shoulder and hauls him back, her blade thrust through his torso entirely. The force of the motion splatters Primsy with sour blood.

She looks at the Princess. Jet looks back at her. The rain is falling all around them, wind whipping fast enough to obscure everything beyond the bubble of this moment, the corpse falling over the side and the shock clear on Jet’s face.

“What?” Primsy manages, equally shocked. “How?”

“Be more careful,” Jet orders. Her voice is strangely muffled, like she’s speaking from under a scarf. Her form  _ wavers,  _ there’s no other word for it, and Primsy realizes that the rain is going  _ through  _ her. 

The Duchess blinks and brings a hand up to rub at her eyes. When she pulls it away, Jet’s gone.

\---

There’s no time for idleness at sea. Well, Primsy’s getting used to a world where there’s no time for idleness at sea; she’s used to easy voyages between the Islands and her journey to Comida had been entirely smooth sailing. She hadn’t needed to involve herself in the running of the ship and had instead spent the time worrying at her embroidery and practicing polite greetings in a variety of languages. 

Things have changed quickly. Even though it makes her frown, Annabelle nods at her when Primsy helps heave the bodies of the pirates to one end of the ship. Primsy takes a little extra care with  _ her  _ pirate, looking at the wound he’d taken through the back and wondering what it could possibly mean. Jet Rocks shouldn’t  _ be  _ here. She couldn’t. She’s back in Candia, probably home with her family and planning an offensive—but there’s a dead man that tells a very different story. And there’s a breathing Duchess who can attest to it as well.

Annabelle says a few words over the bodies, despite them being enemies. She consigns them to the deep with a quiet mutter about the spirits. For someone who doesn’t follow the old ways, the captain doesn’t hesitate to observe them. 

Primsy, in the privacy of her small room, says a prayer of her own for Princess Jet’s safety. Whatever—whatever used her face, which is her current theory—whatever it was acted to save Primsy. She’s not ungrateful.

Her hands shake as she scrubs them in the basin under her mirror, works blood out from under her fingernails. She wonders if Princess Jet ever gets the shakes like this. Probably not.

“She’s brave,” Primsy tells herself, reaching for a hand towel embossed with the crest of House Bleu. “I am a strong woman. I am a leader. I’m brave as well.”

“You are,” a voice says from behind her, and Primsy’s eyes fly to the mirror. 

Not a foot behind her reflection, Jet Rocks is examining her own hands. There’s something sad around her eyes.

Primsy turns around to, to face her. To offer some kind of comfort. She finds the room empty.

Back in the reflection, when she looks at it, Jet’s fiddling with her necklace. 

“I’m sorry,” Primsy says, chills running up and down her spine. “But, ah, I don’t. Are you...? Is this some Candian magic, then?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not much of a, you know,” Jet wiggles her fingers. 

“I  _ don’t  _ know, actually.” Primsy reaches back slowly, not wanting to spook whatever apparition this is. 

A hand catches hers, laces their fingers together. The grip  _ feels  _ like Jet’s, solid if a little cold, familiar enough after she carried Primsy half-dead from the sinking  _ Colby  _ and played a dozen card games to pass the time on their eighteen-day voyage to Candia. Primsy doesn’t look over her shoulder, doesn’t even peek, in case she vanishes.

“You know how spirits exist?” Jet asks, choosing her words very carefully. Primsy can almost see her weighing each one.

She nods.

“So, turns out ghosts do too.”

Primsy’s, well, it’s not like she’s never heard a ghost story. She can think of half a dozen off the top of her head, stories of sailors who haunt shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers that remain at their posts even after death. Stories that are connected so deeply to the Dairy Islands that even Primsy, raised firmly in the light of the Bulb, feels the draw of them.

“But you’re alive,” she blurts. 

Jet shakes her head and Primsy notices suddenly that her clothes are torn in places—there’s a puncture near her chest and one of her puffed sleeves has been reduced to an armband loosely connected to her shirt by a thin strip of fabric.

On one bicep, gleaming in the lamplight of the tiny cabin,  _ Keep Sharp  _ stands out. She catches Primsy looking, flashes her a smile.

“I got it on my lower back,” she teases, “but things got a little... discombobulated.”

“I don’t understand.” Primsy’s mouth is dry. Her hands have started shaking again.

Jet squeezes the one in hers. “I died, Primsy. I’m not alive.”

“Oh.”

It feels... look, Primsy’s been stabbed through the stomach. That’s been her reference point for bad feelings the past few weeks. It doesn’t feel like that. It’s just, a song ending mid-verse. A long story cut short without warning. A joke that ends not even before the punchline, but mid-setup.

_ Jet Rocks is dead,  _ she thinks, and it doesn’t feel like an answer.

“What are you doing here, then?” she asks, and Jet lifts one shoulder in a shrug.

“I don’t really know how all of this is supposed to work, I didn’t mean to—I don’t wanna bother you, Primsy. I just opened my eyes in the crow’s nest and you were there.”

“You should be with your family,” Primsy insists, a little firmer.  _ I am a strong woman,  _ she reminds herself. “I have no claim on your time, you should be with your sister.”

“Wanna know something?” Jet asks, leaning forward a little. She still hasn’t let go of Primsy’s hand.

Primsy swallows, nods.

“I think that too,” the ghost whispers, and vanishes.

\---

That should be the end of  _ that,  _ in Primsy’s opinion. She’s sent Jet Rocks back to her family, hopefully, and maybe she’ll have a turn of good luck—sometimes that’s how the stories go. She’d like to use it to actually get that unicorn she’s always wanted, even if she’ll have to use it to ride into battle, with the way everything’s going.

That should be the end of it, but Primsy keeps catching glimpses: a shadow ducking around the corner, the end of a braid at the edge of her vision. When Annabelle has her run through dagger forms, she sees the glint of the setting sun against the Twizzling Blade out of the corner of her eye. She stumbles when it happens and her cousin catches her shoulder with one hand, worried.

“It is your stomach? If there’s pain, you need to tell me—gut wounds can get nasty and it hasn’t been long enough for me to be satisfied that you’re out of danger.” Annabelle’s eyes are as sharp as her house words.

“Ah, no,” Primsy says apologetically. She’s aware that she’s about to further complicate things. “Um.”

“What is it?”

“Just... ah, I’ll just say it. D’you know anything about being haunted?”

Annabelle drops her sword. She also lets go of Primsy. Both her hands come up to cover her face.

“You’re being... haunted.” Her voice is muffled. 

“Well, yes.” Primsy puts her dagger away and twists her fingers together, wishing she had embroidery or something to fidget with. 

“When you say haunted,” her cousin continues,  _ “please  _ tell me you mean by regret. Or that you’re having nightmares. I know how to deal with nightmares.”

“I’m seeing Jet Rocks around the ship.” If only she had knots to tie or  _ something,  _ something to cover her biggest tell. Primsy’s never been able to keep her fingers still. “And she spoke to me the first night.”

Annabelle does something she’s been doing a lot lately. She inhales deeply, like she’s about to yell, and lets out a single sharp breath instead. She pulls her hands away from her face and bends to pick up her sword.

“Jet Rocks is haunting you,” she says after a long moment. When Primsy nods, her cousin pauses for another few seconds before continuing. “You’re telling me that even in  _ death,  _ the Candian party is inconsiderate.”

“She’s not  _ bothering  _ me,” Primsy objects, but Annabelle casts a look at her hands.

“Seems like she is. Well let me at her, then.”

\---

“Out with it, then,” Annabelle orders the room below decks, empty but for Primsy settling in one of the other chairs pulled up to the table.

The ship rocks gently and a shaft of moonlight comes in through a porthole. In the beam, fuzzy but quickly growing more distinct, the semi-translucent form of Jet Rocks manifests.

She doesn’t pull out a chair, just looks around the room, takes in Annabelle and Primsy, who’s picked up a shirt to mend in the low light.

“Why is it that you’re here, Princess? My patience with Candian influence, as committed to the alliance as we are, is wearing thin. I don’t want you haunting my cousin.” Annabelle leans back in her chair, balancing on the back two legs and kicking her boots up onto the table.

“Well I didn’t get to  _ pick,”  _ Jet grumbles. “No offense, Primsy—”

“None taken.”

“—but it was like this: I died, my aunt told me the work wasn’t finished, and I opened my eyes in the middle of the storm. I don’t know how to  _ ghost travel  _ or whatever, so I’m still here.”

“You spoke to your aunt?” Primsy asks, looking up from the tear she’s mending.

“Yeah,” Jet says, smiling a little. “Aunt Rococoa showed up and told me there’re ‘things we can do from the other side.’ So,” she raises her hands in a  _ look at me  _ gesture, “here I am. On the other side.”

“I have a ghost passenger now.” Annabelle lets out a groan, tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling. “The Bulb hates me.”

“Actually,” Jet pipes up helpfully, “it turns out that the Bulb can’t really  _ hate  _ anything—”

“I have a  _ heretical ghost passenger  _ now. Fine. You know what? The way our lives are going, this might as well happen.”

Primsy can’t help but give a tiny laugh, clapping her hands over her mouth. It’s just—it’s  _ funny  _ to see her cousin so resigned.

“That just about sums it up,” Jet says, amusement dancing in her eyes for the first time since her appearance.

\---

“I’ve been thinking about how you killed my husband,” Primsy says two days later, again alone in the cabin. 

Jet hums from where she’s leaning against one wall. She’s getting better at that, appearing and disappearing and being able to lean against things. The first time she tried it she fell through one of the masts.

They’re keeping her secret. At least, they haven’t announced her presence to the rest of the sailors. As much as Annabelle says they can trust the crew, Primsy’s well-aware that their enemies can force them to tell inconvenient truths. If they never tell any of the sailors, any accusations of witchcraft will have that much less evidence.

“We’ll be near the Yogurt Shoals soon,” she continues, “and I’m thinking of stopping there.”

Jet freezes, one of her shoulders sinking through the wall when she loses focus. She pulls it back out, shaking out her arm. “Why are you thinking that. Why are we even going near there?”

“This time of year the current takes us in that direction, and the storm we ran into blew us off course for Lacramor.”

“If you stop there, they’ll kill you. Probably. No, if you stop there they’ll kill you for sure.”

“There’s a little bit of a problem with that,” Primsy says, shaking out the dress she’s pieced together from various clothing around the ship. Sewn into the back, bold as anything, is the crest of her late husband’s family. “I’m the head of House Bleu now, you see.”

“That doesn’t—I was the heir of the House of Rocks, and they killed  _ me.” _

“They killed you after removing you as an heir, I seem to recall,” Primsy snaps, getting a little frustrated.

“How are you even the head of the House, your marriage was unconsummated—”

“It was  _ legal in the eyes of the Bulb—” _

“They could  _ kill  _ you, no one there will be trustworthy—”

“I already have no one to trust!” Primsy shouts, standing. “I have my cousin, who for the first six months of my reign I was sure would move against me. I have her crew, who I can’t tell my secrets in case they come in contact with my enemies! I have  _ you,  _ and you’re—” she cuts herself off.

“You can say it.”

“My claim is sound,” Primsy stresses instead. “My claim is the  _ only  _ sound claim, and if there’s a scrap of honor in the Yogurt Shoals at least some of them will follow me.”

“You can say it, Duchess.”

“We can’t help fight this war if we never recruit anyone. It’s dangerous, yes, but I have to do this. I am the  _ only one  _ who can do this.”

“Primsy.”

“I have you,” she says, shoulders slumping, “and you’re dead.”

\---

“What am I doing here?” Jet hisses, watching Primsy disembark from the crow’s nest. The dead heir of a rebel country at her side will  _ not  _ help her efforts to take control of the Shoals. 

“I used to say that too,” a voice says from beside her. 

Jet turns to see Rococoa sitting on the edge of the nest, unbothered by the weight of her armor. 

“I tried to keep all of us together,” her aunt continues, “and even when I thought I knew what I was doing—well. Don’t get too caught up in figuring out the right path. I leave that up to Lazuli, anyway.”

“What the fuck am I—did you put me here? I should be with Ruby and Mom and Pops. Are they even—” Jet cuts herself off.

“How much do you want to know?” the General asks her, eyes distant. “How much do you  _ actually  _ want to know?”

“What am I doing here?” Jet says more directly, actively questioning.

“Candia needs outside support. You need to make sure we  _ get  _ that outside support, which means saving Duchess Coldbottle from pirates if need be. It’s not about what you  _ want.  _ It’s not about what you think you should have.”

“That’s not fair.”

“War isn’t,” her aunt says. “Give up on  _ fair.  _ Do what you have to do for Candia.”

“That’s it?  _ That’s  _ the great tactical advice you’ve got for me,” Jet spits, deeply disappointed.

“I’d say ‘do it so the  _ world doesn’t end’,”  _ Rococoa divulges, like it’s a fucking secret, “but that’s not what you actually need to hear.”

Jet looks away to gather her thoughts. When she looks back, her aunt is gone.

It’s  _ deeply  _ annoying to be on the receiving end of that.

\---

Primsy returns to the ship two days later with a proclamation stamped with the seals of nearly all the houses in the Yogurt Shoals, minor and major, recognizing her claim to House Bleu. Moreover, she’s coaxed and prodded more than half of them into giving her material resources to fight in the war. For the Dairy Islands that means one thing most of all—ships.

She wakes in her cabin to the strangled scream of an intruder, scrabbling back on her hands as Jet  _ looms  _ out of the darkness with a terrifying look. Shadows swirl around her ghostly form and when she opens her mouth a cacophony of sounds pour out—Primsy catches a word or two of Ceresian mixed with the sound of blades clashing and what sounds like someone sobbing.

Primsy leaps from her bunk and grabs her washbasin, bringing it down with a  _ crack  _ on the head of her asparagus assassin. Jet closes her mouth and they’re plunged into silence.

Jet appears to be breathing hard, chest heaving, but she’s completely soundless. Primsy’s heartbeat is loud in her ears as she looks down at the dark-clothed figure that somehow made their way on board.

_ They’ll have sent more than one,  _ she thinks, because those are the kinds of thoughts she has to entertain now. She takes her dagger from under her pillow and Jet draws Flickerish, the both of them moving as one toward the cabin door. Covering her blindspots, making up for her flinches, Jet Rocks shadows her through the entire battle that ensues.

In the coming war, this will be a common theme.

\---

_ In the years that followed the Rocks Affair, Duchess Primsy Coldbottle of Lacramor, Lady of House Bleu, Regent of House Cheddar stood fast in her commitment to the historical allies of the Dairy Islands. Under her command the navy once again became a force to fear; at one point they occupied the great Butter Lake of Ceresia, Pulp Bay, and the port of Carn simultaneously. The Duchess herself, accompanied by Captain Annabelle Cheddar, undertook a perilous voyage around the southern tip of Calorum with the ships of House Bleu in order to provide naval support for the Battle of Greenhold. _

_ The Duchess was apparently blessed with preternatural luck in war, and participated in conflicts both within council chambers and on the field of battle. She attributed her victories to a token she carried—a preserved licorice flower, encased in sugarglass that was eventually embedded in the hilt of one dagger.  _

From  _ Stories from the Compost Heap: A Who’s Who of the Bulbian Schism _

**Author's Note:**

> title for this fic comes from ‘Sinking Ship’ by Wild Child.   
> i know everybody’s writing really heartfelt and heartbreaking fic about jet dying right now (and i really love it all!) but i kinda... feel like i kinda Did That when mourning lapin and i wanted to write something a little more, idk, kinda lighthearted? i’m really gonna miss jet but i wanted to make something fun with it. so i hope this fic was a good read! this didn’t end up as kind of shippy as it was going to originally, but the notes i had for that didn’t super fit the tone so i ended up going with what felt more authentic—jet and primsy are together in the epilogue, after presumably spending years building up trust and figuring out how to date when one of you is a ghost, but it was unclear enough for me to put the friendship tag as the main one for this fic.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think! :) they really make me happy!


End file.
